Conference Presentations and Talks by Eric Hengstebeck
“‘Open, doors of time!’: Whitman’s Drum-Taps and the Temporality of Dying.”
“‘Radiant stations of the crass’: Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T and the Promise of Aesthetics.”
"'Song of Myself,' American Epic: Democracy, Sex, and Death in the Modern World"
“‘The strangest-born among all the intellectual freaks of nature’: Receiving Whitman’s Monstrous Multitudes.”
“‘A lover of America’: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the Essential Ambiguity of Desire.”
Book Reviews by Eric Hengstebeck
Rev. of The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton (Harvard University Press, 2010)
Specs IV: Kaleidoscopic Point, 2011
Papers by Eric Hengstebeck
Hypnaesthesis argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categor... more Hypnaesthesis argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categories in the gothic and dark romantic traditions of antebellum American literature that provide critical insights into the experiential costs of the exhortations to normative vigilance prevalent in the American Enlightenment. During this period unceasing vigilance became the watchword for liberty as the Lockean conception of the self, understood as dependent on waking consciousness, fused with Protestant and Enlightenment ideas about salvation, productivity, and freedom to form the philosophical and political core of American identity. By exploring the nocturnal territory of thought through aesthetic experience in the works of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville, I show how American literature provides alternative paths for post-enlightenment thinking, introducing sleep as a fundamental problem for reimagining subjectivity and collectivity. Beginning with the category of somnambulism in Brown's Edgar Huntly (1799), I show how an emergent medico-literary understanding of the nervous self in the eighteenth century provided an opening for identifying a novel form of sharedness in the pre-subjective affect that I call somnipathy, adapting the nineteenth-century definition of this term from Noah Webster's 1848 American Dictionary of the English Language: "sleep from sympathy, or by the process of mesmerism." The interconnected sense of life arising from somnipathy established the foundation, in my account, for the aesthetic category of nightmare developed in The Philosophy of Sleep (1830) by Robert Macnish, who later created an I cannot begin to fully express or repay the debt of gratitude that I owe the members of my dissertation committee. First and foremost, I am grateful to my advisor Betsy Erkkila for her unstinting support and intellectual inspiration during my time at Northwestern and, especially, over the long and winding road that this project has encompassed. I am grateful to Julia Stern for showing me the true value of close reading and for her persistent belief that I was capable of writing with greater clarity and precision. And I am grateful to Vivasvan Soni for being a joyful interrogator of my ideas and a fellow traveler whose careful step guided my philosophical wanderings out of more than one epistemological thicket. Writing is a profoundly social activity; I will be forever grateful to the many generous interlocutors who have stimulated and encouraged my thinking over the years. I have learned much from conversations with Ivy Wilson, Harris Feinsod, Bonnie Honig, Sam Weber, and Lars Tønder, and I feel great warmth for the friends and colleagues who made Northwestern a vibrant intellectual community for me, including
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Conference Presentations and Talks by Eric Hengstebeck
Book Reviews by Eric Hengstebeck
Papers by Eric Hengstebeck